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Light has profoundly impacted modern medicine and healthcare, with numerous luminescent agents and imaging techniques currently being used to assess health and treat diseases. As an emerging concept in luminescence, aggregation-induced emission (AIE) has shown great potential in biological applications due to its advantages in terms of brightness, biocompatibility, photostability, and positive correlation with concentration. This review provides a comprehensive summary of AIE luminogens applied in imaging of biological structure and dynamic physiological processes, disease diagnosis and treatment, and detection and monitoring of specific analytes, followed by representative works. Discussions on critical issues and perspectives on future directions are also included. This review aims to stimulate the interest of researchers from different fields, including chemistry, biology, materials science, medicine, etc., thus promoting the development of AIE in the fields of life and health.

Dual-modal fluorescence and magnetic resonance imaging (FLI/MRI) is important for the early diagnosis of malignant tumors. However, facile and opportune strategies to synergistically enhance fluorescence intensity and magnetic resonance (MR) contrast have rarely been reported. Herein, we present a facile strategy using albumin aggregates (AAs) to synergistically enhance the fluorescence intensity by aggregation-induced emission (AIE) and MR contrast with prolonged rotational correlation time (τ R ) of Gd(III) chelates and the diffusion correlation time (τ D ) of surrounding water molecules. The amphiphilic dual-modal FLI/MRI probe of NGd was facilely loaded into albumin pockets and then formed AAs to generate a supramolecular structure of NGd-albumin aggregates (NGd-AAs), which show excellent biocompatibility and biosafety, and exhibit superior fluorescence quantum yield and r 1 over NGd with 6- and 8-fold enhancement, respectively. Moreover, compared with the clinical MRI contrast agent Gd-DOTA, r 1 of NGd-AAs showed a 17-fold enhancement. Therefore, NGd-AAs successfully elicited high-performance dual-modal FLI/MRI in vitro and in vivo and high contrast MR signals were observed in the liver and tumor after intravenous injection of NGd-AAs at a dosage of 6 μmol Gd(III)/kg body weight. This generic and feasible strategy successfully realized a synergistic effect for dual-modal FLI/MRI.